suffering
Explanation
The Joke
A small red robot asks a larger blue robot: "Do you think machines are capable of suffering?" The blue robot says "Nope." The red robot follows up: "What do you do when you start to suffer?" The blue robot explains: "I find the source of the suffering, determine that my attention to that circumstance is proof of a rich internal life, and reprogram myself to find it pleasant." The red robot then says "I put it in this jar -- your robot's sad and it's still acting upset!" The blue robot responds: "Try ignoring it until it reboots."
The Humor
The comic works on two levels. On the surface, it is about robots discussing whether machines can suffer, with one robot blithely denying machine suffering while simultaneously describing an elaborate coping mechanism that sounds suspiciously like suffering -- finding the source of pain and reframing it as evidence of a "rich internal life" is exactly the kind of cognitive reframing humans use in therapy. The deeper joke is that this is also a commentary on how humans deal with suffering: we often deny we are suffering while simultaneously deploying sophisticated psychological defense mechanisms to manage the very suffering we claim not to have. The final suggestion to "try ignoring it until it reboots" is a darkly funny analog to the human strategy of suppressing emotions until they go away on their own.